Former JPL employee helped ‘Gravity’ get the science, dialogue right

Kevin Grazier, a former JPL employee who consulted on the new movie “Gravity,” speaks on Oct. 1 about the science behind science fiction movies in a visit to California State Northridge. (Andy Holzman/Los Angeles Daily News)

LOS ANGELES >> NASA is closed right now because of the partial government shutdown, but it’s still possible to get to outer space. All it takes is the price of a movie ticket.

That’s how astronaut Michael Massimino said he felt watching the film “Gravity.” And if anyone knows what it feels like to be in space, it’s Massimino — he’s logged over 30 hours spacewalking and was part of the final servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009.

“There’s nothing like being there, but this movie and the IMAX Hubble movie come close,” Massimino said. “It gives you the idea of what it feels like to be there.”

“Gravity,” an immersive 3-D movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón, stars Sandra Bullock as a medical engineer and George Clooney as a seasoned astronaut left stranded 370 miles above Earth after a debris field destroys their ship during a routine mission to prepare the Hubble telescope.

Since opening last weekend to $55 million — a record for the month of October — and already earning more than $100 million worldwide, “Gravity” has monopolized Oscar buzz. Its two, and only two, stars have captured the bulk of that buzz, although its technical achievements for portraying mostly realistic sights and sounds (or lack thereof) of outer space have also drawn raves.

To make sure Clooney’s and Bullock’s — and vicariously, the audience’s — hellish trip into space was as scientifically accurate as possible, Cuarón contacted astronauts and scientists to make sure every little detail was accurate, from which way a knob would turn, to what a wriggling body would look like in the vast reaches of weightlessness.

“He really wanted to present the audience with a ‘you are there’ experience of a mission that goes horribly wrong,” said Kevin Grazier, a former science planning engineer and investigation scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who consulted on the film.

When “Gravity” was only in script phase in 2010, Cuarón contacted JPL to lend insight to ensure his characters spewed the proper terminology. He was connected with Grazier, who at the time was working on the Constellation project, a human space flight program. Grazier worked at JPL from 1995 to 2011 and also has consulted on TV shows like “Battlestar Galactica” and “Eureka.”

“There are some aspects of space culture that can only be fully understood being on the inside,” Grazier said. “There are aspects and vernacular that you’re not going to get perfect unless you talk to someone in that field.”

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Warner Bros. sent Grazier a copy of the script after he met with Cuarón, and he immediately started pouring over it.

“Most of it was dialogue — they wouldn’t phrase it like this, or phrase it like that,” Grazier recalled.

“Gravity” was pushed back several times to allow for more edits and a crisp 3-D conversion. It has received stellar reviews (currently, 97 percent of film critics are gushing over the movie, according to the website Rotten Tomatoes).

“It’s a terrifying movie but an amazingly well-done movie,” said Grazier. “Some of the dialogue is verbatim [from the script], but some of the things have been vastly upgraded.”

During production, Cuarón couldn’t actually film “Gravity” in space, so he had to improvise. A camera attached to a robotic arm floated around Bullock and Clooney to get Cuarón’s signature, uninterrupted roving shots (the entire first 20 minutes or so of “Gravity” is one long take).

The actors themselves also were attached to a mechanical rig inside a large box to get that authentic weightless look.

“You had to retrain your body from the neck down to react and move as though in zero-G with the benefit of zero-G moving your body,” Bullock said at a news conference.

In what’s the epitome of a long-distance call, Bullock contacted astronaut Cady Coleman while Coleman was on a six-month expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), acquiring real-time research of what it was like to be in space. Coleman and Bullock were introduced after their families met, Bullock said.

Coleman said during the “Gravity” news conference that it’s so easy to move in space that her free-flowing hair in the space station could be used to push against the interior and glide her to where she wanted to go.

“I could move down the entire length of the space station based on my push against a single hair,” Coleman said. “It takes so little, and so when you’re going someplace, you’re just using, like, a pinky.”

Though Bullock and Clooney are the only two stars in the movie — unless you count the billions of luminous balls of hydrogen and helium in the background — there are cameo appearances by the Hubble telescope, ISS, the Soyuz, a Russian spacecraft, and the Shenzhou, a Chinese spacecraft. ISS is the backdrop of pivotal scene.

“The realism was absolutely spectacular,” said Mark Uhran, former director of the ISS division of NASA for 28 years. “We of course took many high-definition video and stills of the International Space Station, and you couldn’t get more realistic.”

Though “Gravity” brought Massimino back to working on the Hubble telescope, he said he was glad that the reminiscent factor stopped when the Hubble telescope was obliterated by debris and left Clooney and Bullock stranded.

“The tools they used were just like what we used,” Mossimino said, “and in an exaggerated way, it shows space is a dangerous business.”

Debris is par for the course in outer space: ISS and Hubble look like they’ve been pelted with bullets, Uhran said.

But unlike in “Gravity,” the Hubble and ISS are still intact.

“We’re always concerned about debris, but the thing they ran into was really bad,” Massimino said. “We’ve never had a situation where we had to evacuate or have anyone hurt by debris. We try to track it and avoid it while we can.”

Should an astronaut find himself off structure and lost in space, “JPL would be mostly cut out of that interaction,” Grazier said.

But there would still be hope, and a lot of improvisation, for the astronauts, Massimino said.

“If you become separated from the spaceship, there’s a small jet pack called a safer that you could try to engage to get back to the spaceship,” Massimino said.

Clooney’s character in “Gravity” used a safer several times, but Bullock never did because “she was well beyond what that thing could help her with,” Massimino said.

Despite being hailed as one of the most accurate sci-fi movies to date by some critics, others have nitpicked “Gravity” for its occasional inaccuracy — Bullock’s short hair wasn’t flowing in the weightlessness, or it takes much longer for an astronaut to get out of his or her suit than was portrayed in the movie.

But none of that bothered Uhran.

“This scenario of a human being in free drift has been around since the dawn of science fiction, but ‘Gravity’ provides the most realistic rendition of a human being in space in history,” he said.